Anne Applebaum laments British “retreat”:

This second development is not unrelated to the first: Suddenly, without much discussion, it seems as if Britain — a nuclear and conventional military power, a staunch U.S. ally, a pillar of NATO — has lost its historic interest in foreign policy.

Whenever an interventionist complains about “retreat,” we should be extremely skeptical of whatever comes next in the argument. “Retreat” is normally code for a foreign policy that is slightly less aggressive and meddlesome than the author wants. It doesn’t matter whether the policies in question actually involve a significant lessening of involvement in the rest of the world. Very often, they do not. Bear in mind that Britain just closed its bases in Afghanistan last fall, and it is provided limited to support in the war on ISIS, which is all the more remarkable when one considers that it is yet another war of choice for Britain.

Interventionists also define “retreat” by comparing it to the recent peak in overseas activism, and then treating any departure from that arbitrary standard as proof of withdrawal from the world. Measured against Britain’s almost constant involvement in foreign wars of choice between 1999 and 2011, one can say that Britain is not involved in as many unnecessary and prolonged wars as it has been recently, but that tells us nothing about its foreign policy more generally. The charge of “retreat” is often leveled at a government for “failing” to take on new commitments or to participate in new conflicts. Applebaum cites such a “failure” to support the bombing of Syria in 2013 as an example of how Britain has “lost” its interest in foreign policy. Britain hasn’t “lost” its interest in foreign policy, but has rejected the kind of foreign policy Applebaum and other interventionists want. The U.K. government is finally, albeit grudgingly, bringing its foreign policy more closely in line with the views of the electorate that it has worked hard to ignore for most of the last fifteen years.

The British public is much more skeptical of involvement in foreign conflicts, and it is understandably more preoccupied with the country’s internal political developments, but it’s not clear why that is a bad thing. Applebaum dubs this “provincialism,” as if it were wrong to give priority to the internal affairs of one’s own country. The truth is that the British political class is just now beginning to pay attention to what the voters want, or rather what they don’t want. As a result, Britain’s leaders are paying less attention to foreign conflicts than interventionists such as Applebaum would like, but they are still paying much more attention to them than their voters prefer.